Screwed By The Network / American Broadcasting Corporation Live Action Shows

• ABC doesn't have a Friday Night Death Slot, it has a Thursday Night Death Slot. The network has tried and failed to get a successful show going at 8:00 PM (Ugly Betty was the only scripted exception, although Whose Line Is It Anyway? and more recently Wipeout have both managed to run a few years by being rather low-cost) for over 30 years. In 2012, the geopolitical/military thriller Last Resort was aired Thursdays at eight. The ratings started as bad as you'd expect from a show that had to compete directly against (among other things) The Big Bang Theory and The X Factor, and got worse to the point where it finished last in its time slot twice in a row, after which ABC killed it. Downplayed, in that ABC did air the remaining episodes and allowed its studio to give the series an actual ending. Of course, with Grey's Anatomy being such a runaway hit in the hour afterwards, does ABC really need to worry too much about that?
  • ABC did try to subvert this with FlashForward, where the show debuted to promising ratings, and looked to be successful. But ratings declined steadily going into the hiatus, and despite this, it was brought back afterwards at the same time slot. By that point, the show had only half of the ratings that Part 1 had. ABC gave the show every chance to succeed, but it just didn't take enough people to become the Spiritual Successor to Lost that the network desperately wanted. If it was screwed in any way, it was by putting it on at 8 rather than 9, where violence that didn't hurt Lost was perhaps a little off-putting at the earlier hour, and certainly didn't make any of the Grey's Anatomy fans watch it.
  • Obviously, it has not helped that for a very long time, Thursdays at 8 has been home to other networks' ratings juggernauts. First Magnum, P.I. became a hit for CBS, then NBC's "Must-See TV" dominated the entire night for close to two decades with The Cosby Show and Friends anchoring the night in the 8 PM hour, then the reality juggernauts Survivor and then American Idol moved in, and just as Idol moved in The Big Bang Theory became a huge hit on the night for CBS, and finally the NFL started putting Thursday night football games on CBS, then NBC, then Fox. In all but three years from 1982-83 to 2005-06, at least one show in the Thursday 8 PM timeslot placed in the top ten shows of the season (most of them in the top three), and in all but one year from 1981-82 to the present, at least one show placed in the top 20 - and only in the last year of the top ten streak, when Dancing with the Stars helped knock Survivor out of the top ten, did ABC have any of them,^note The one year no show placed in the top 20 was 1992-93, the first year NBC went without Cosby on the night, when ABC plugged in the NBC castoff Matlock at midseason and drew the best ratings of any show to air in the timeslot, edging out The Simpsons and Wings'', all three of which barely cracked the end-of-season top 30. until...
  • In the 2014-15 season, ABC finally figured out a solution; an all-Shonda Rhimes night, with Grey's moving to the 8pm slot, where it does fine for an older show, only trailing BBT, its spinoff Young Sheldon, and TNF pregame and first-quarter action (with Idol's last year on Fox being the only other non-CBS non-football show to crack the top 30 in the timeslot).
• ABC was pretty much the Fox of the 2010s. Pan Am, Missing, Body of Proof, Zero Hour (2013), No Ordinary Family, Better with You, How to Live with Your Parents (for the Rest of Your Life), Red Widow, and countless other series have gotten yanked off the air pretty quickly, with several shows ending on cliffhangers.
• ABC's high-profile cancellation spree of 2016, which did in Castle, Agent Carter, Galavant, Nashville and The Muppets, can be blamed on a couple of internal network factors. First, Paul Lee, who had headed ABC since 2010, was relieved of his duties and replaced by Channing Dungey, who decided to sweep nearly everything connected to Lee under the rug, leaving only established shows (like Grey's Anatomy and Scandal) to remain. Additionally, Disney, the parent company of ABC, posted an earnings miss for the second quarter of 2016 due to its under-performing video game (which it later shut down entirely) and television units ^note fueled in large part due to declining ESPN subscribers, the rapidly expanding popularity of Netflix, and then-new hit shows of rival channels such as PAW Patrol and Teen Titans Go! causing Disney Channel to lose viewers. . Thus, Disney decided that ABC's shows that were slated for renewal despite average ratings (The Muppets is said to be one of those said shows) were to be canceled at the last minute in order to recoup losses in the television unit.
  • Galavant had been the victim of network screwing long before the spree happened. The network shoved it into the month-long window that their other show Once Upon a Time was on its Winter hiatus, with very little advertising beyond the series premiere, in a timeslot that competed with award shows like the Oscars.
  • The Muppets (2015) got sabotaged in the middle of its run. The show was initially heavily promoted by ABC and did well in the ratings despite a divisive critical and viewer reaction over the change in direction with the Muppets franchise, being scheduled on Tuesday nights, against NCIS and The Voice, and similar to Happy Endings above, Citytv airing episodes a day early. Because of the mixed reception, ABC gave the series a Retool, culminating in series co-creator Bob Kushell getting fired and replaced with Kristin Newman, who ordered the revamp. The reception of the episodes that followed the winter hiatus (when Newman was in charge) was much more applauded, but ABC was no longer airing promos for the show, focusing more on The Real O'Neals (which was canceled a season later). Consequently, the ratings tanked, resulting in the unceremonious axing of the series just before the television season's end.
• While 666 Park Avenue received modest ratings by Nielsen standards, it was later revealed that 77% of its viewings came from DVR recordings. However, ABC ignored this, and the show was canceled anyway. Fortunately, this announcement came early enough for the final episodes to be re-written and re-shot to give the series closure. Unfortunately, unlike Last Resort, the show was pulled off the schedule before they could actually air that finale. It finally did over the summer, only to see another screwing with the literal last minute of the show's finale being preempted for the George Zimmerman trial verdict in the East.
• Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was first put into direct competition with NCIS and was given an incredibly erratic schedule in its first season, not helped by the fact that its second half had to be scheduled around the Winter Olympics. Episodes would be shown in small bursts before being put on hold for several weeks before the next batch would air, such as "T.R.A.C.K.S" being the only episode shown in February with three weeks between the episodes before and after it. This did nothing to help the show's ratings and frustrated fans so much that one of the big announcements from Marvel was that the last batch of Season 1 episodes would be shown without any interruption. Thankfully, the show was renewed (it helps that it's part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe juggernaut) and Marvel was keen to point out that the second season would be broadcast in two uninterrupted batches with an eight-week winter hiatus when Agent Carter will be shown. It was also pushed back an hour so that it would no longer be in the same time slot as the #1 drama in the US.
  • The same mistake was made during Season 4 when ABC only showed two episodes in November (with a three-week break in between).
• As the 1980s rolled around American Bandstand, which was the longest-running broadcast program aimed at mainstream youth to air on American network broadcast television, started a steady ratings decline. One key factor in this was the rise of MTV, who with their slick production values and expensively produced music videos quickly made Bandstand an anachronism. Not helping matters was ABC's handling of the program during its later years. Since September 7, 1963, Bandstand, aired on Saturday afternoons for an hour on ABC. But by 1986-87, Bandstand was truncated to just a half hour^note ABC actually offered Dick Clark a three-year extension, which would have kept Bandstand on through 1990. Clark declined because ABC wanted to continue at 30 minutes and Clark felt it needed to be an hour.. By this point, Bandstand was preempted on many occasions by televised college football games (especially in light of a court-ordered deregulation in 1984) and even occasional special presentations, like unsold game show pilots. By September 1987, the writing was pretty much on the wall and after over 30 years on ABC, Bandstand was dropped from the schedule. Bandstand however, would limp along for two more seasons, first in first-run syndication and finally on the USA Network, where Dick Clark passed the hosting baton to comedian David Hirsch.
• The original Battlestar Galactica ran on Sunday nights; it got very positive reviews and grew a fan following comparable to Star Trek, leading some to pin it as the next big science fiction universe in a field that was already crowded with the likes of Star Trek and the newly-released Star Wars...and yet ABC chose to cancel the series after its one and only season. Not only did the series, which ABC forced to be a weekly series instead of TV movies where the budgetary demands could have been manageable, get hammered by All in the Family on rival CBS, who moved that series on Galactica's slot with the intention to turn up the heat on ABC, but the network was beginning to lose money because of the show's high budget. However, creator-producer Glen A. Larson claimed ABC deliberately screwed over the series in an attempt to give their then-number-one program, Mork & Mindy, a more favorable time-slot. Regardless, fans were not too pleased with ABC's behavior, and a year later the network tried to redeem itself by green lighting Galactica 1980, but that series ended up being poorly received and canned after just ten episodes, putting the kibosh on the original franchise.
• Better Off Ted quickly grew a Firefly-level intense fanbase, and to ABC's credit was given a second season despite low ratings. Then screwing truly began with the network providing minimal promotion, launching the season in December (exceptionally late for a returning show on the network), airing episodes during the holiday season (even though by 2009 most US viewers had been conditioned to expect new shows to be on mid-season break and so likely didn't expect the series to be on at that time), and when the ratings weren't stellar began burning off the episodes two at a time in January, canceling the series, thus giving the show a Season 2 that ran for less than two months with the last two episodes not being aired in the U.S. (they did air in Australia later that summer, and both are available on Netflix) due to the network's plan of airing them as Filler if the NBA Finals ended early wasn't needed due to that year's series going a full seven games.
• A combination of this and Screwed by the Lawyers appears to have played a role in the demise of The Charmings. That series was a Midseason Replacement in the spring of 1987 that aired on a prototype TGIF lineup, doing well enough to get picked up for a full season. However, somewhere along the way The Walt Disney Company balked; feeling that it was an unauthorized parody of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (the premise of the show being that a now married Snow White and Prince Charming got transported to present-day Burbank). Making matters worse was the decision to move the show to Thursdays at 8:30 p.m. Eastern to compete against new series A Different World and following the Charmings getting hammered in the ratings; ABC then decided to move the Charmings up a half-hour to 8:00 p.m. Eastern. Against the top-rated show on television (and the parent show of A Different World); The Cosby Show. No points for guessing how this ended up.
• ABC had a potential hit with Commander in Chief — rave reviews and a Golden Globe for Geena Davis's performance, and the best ratings of the Fall 2005 crop of debut shows — but wound up fumbling it badly. Creator/Executive Producer Rod Lurie took too long to produce episodes for the network since he wanted to write and direct everything himself. ABC was understandably upset, but their unwise next moves hurt the show beyond repair. Instead of giving Rod Lurie a scriptwriter to help him out, ABC instead fired Lurie and brought in Steven Bochco as the new showrunner midway through production of its first season. They also didn't bring it back right away after the traditional holiday break due to not wanting to compete with Winter Olympics coverage on NBC — and when it was brought back, it was in a different time slot that wasn't properly advertised. Ratings suffered, so they canned it, one season in.
• Covington Cross aired only six episodes over eight weeks, being constantly preempted and/or moved due to sports programming. It didn't help that the show was expensive to produce (shot on location in England) and had been a prime target for Moral Guardians due to its violent content. Regardless, after the show's "dismal" ratings, it was canned.
• One of Litton's Weekend Adventure first shows, Culture Click (an educational clone of The Soup), got screwed in Atlanta when their ABC station aired it at 4:00 AM Eastern. To be fair, it was the dud show in the inaugural Litton lineup and the first canceled program.
• Cupid was bounced around from the Friday Night Death Slot to Saturday (the two nights people are least likely to be home to watch television) to Thursday against NBC's Must-See TV, justifying its cancellation before the end of the season. The show was Un-Canceled years later, as ABC had given its creator permission to try again...but the revival didn't get much better treatment, and after ratings slipped it was quickly canned once again.
• ABC started airing season 2 of Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23 and Season 3 of Happy Endings on Tuesday, October 23, a month after the start of the season. More importantly, it was after the start of popular Tuesday comedies New Girl and Raising Hope, and new comedies Go On, The New Normal, The Mindy Project and Ben and Kate, all of which share the same time slot. Then they began seriously messing with Apt. 23, airing unaired episodes from Season 1 and airing episodes from Season 2 at random, resulting in serious discontinuities between episodes. Then, on January 22, 2013, they canceled the show and announced they were not going to air the remaining 8 episodes on the network. After the end of the 2013 broadcast season, the missing eight episodes were seen online via Hulu, allowing some kind of closure.
  • This was actually a result of being screwed in Season 1 when, after a positive response at upfronts, ABC had ordered 13 episodes and scheduled it as an actual midseason replacement with a premiere date in February. Perhaps ABC got cold feet about the title, not least because they were taking similar heat over Good Christian Bitches, which became Good Christian Belles and finally just GCB. After putting Apt. 23 through the same rollercoaster, they rescheduled its premiere date to the end of April, allowing just 6 episodes or so and forcing the mixed-up order in Season 2.
  • During Season 3 of Happy Endings, the show not only aired against New Girl (which was a similar, more popular show), but Canada's Citytv aired the show two days early, allowing some fans to watch the show on the internet through piracy, instead of when it premiered in the U.S. They stopped doing this six episodes in, but it was too late, as it and Apartment 23 moved to Sundays at ten (a time-slot usually reserved for dramas), then on the Friday Night Death Slot.
• After The Drew Carey Show posted a strong sixth season, ABC gave it three more seasons, but then had second thoughts after season 8 experienced a drop in ratings. The network ultimately burned off the contractually-obligated ninth season in the summer of 2004. ABC also forbade Christa Miller, who by that point had moved on to Scrubs, from returning for the series finale, as the executives felt that doing so would just provide free advertising for rival NBC.
• Emily's Reasons Why Not got royally screwed over as despite the pilot getting decent ratings it got axed leaving the remaining episodes unaired. Thankfully the show did later get a DVD release containing all the episodes which sold better than expected.
• For Life got solid reviews and started off promisingly, but by virtue of being scheduled up against the higher-rated FBI: Most Wanted and New Amsterdam (2018) ratings started falling off a cliff, only getting a major bump in the season finale. The murder of George Floyd, along with the subsequent resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement, gave ABC a good excuse to give it a second season out of goodwill to the audience. Then they proceeded to shatter that goodwill by moving it to Wednesday nights, on the same time slot as Chicago P.D. and SWAT. Worse ratings resulted, and with the Floyd murder and protests out of the news cycle, ABC had no reason to renew it second time around. That didn't discourage the producers, though, as they were given permission to shop the series elsewhere, resulting in IMDb TV picking it up for another season.
• Forever got the ax after the end of the 2014-15 season despite modestly good ratings and an intensely loyal fanbase. It was hurt by ABC's sparse promotion of the show, the fact that the more action and sci-fi oriented Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was its lead-in^note aside from Henry's immortality, Forever was a straight police procedural, and was geared toward a different demographic than SHIELD, and that it was produced by rival company Warner Bros.. By contrast, ABC renewed American Crime, which had similar ratings but was produced in-house; and Galavant, which had lower ratings (and was canceled a season later anyway) but was also produced in-house.
• Despite being mentioned in promos aired on ABC that week, the final episode of Free Spirit (1989), "Love and Death", was preempted at the last minute for a rerun of Full House. The episode never wound up airing at all in the United States, though it did air overseas.
• Fridays was a Saturday Night Live knock-off that aired on ABC from 1980 to 1982 (though it was first pitched and developed in 1979). Despite clashes with the censors and initial unfavorable comparisons to Saturday Night Live, it did win over fans who were disillusioned over SNL's decline in quality at the time (when Lorne Michaels and the remnants of his original cast left and Jean Doumanian was named the new showrunner) and cited by most critics (past and present, as seen in this article, ""Fridays: The SNL Ripoff That Nearly Surpassed the Original"") as the only sketch show that was worthy of replacing SNL.
  
  However, ABC was wary about the show's content, which, despite banning the infamous "Diner of the Living Dead" sketch, the writers continued with such subversive and creative sketches. Such as a Hope/Crosby comedy in El Salvador, a live-action Popeye cartoon with Bluto as a fascist dictator, a dramatic sketch about a punk rocker who tries to make amends with his elderly father^note only to find out that the old man's claims of "I Have No Son!" and "Who are you?" aren't cold-hearted ways of disowning him, an Italian sex comedy about a nurse who seduces an old man, and, what's now considered the show's best, a parody of The Rocky Horror Picture Show that lasted 17 minutes and made fun of Ronald Reagan and the new wave of Republicanism. During the second season, ABC moved the show from its cushy 11:30 PM timeslot to midnight and extended it from 70 to 90 minutes to make room for Nightline.
  
  When the ratings suffered because of this, ABC had the brilliant idea to air the show in primetime on April 23, 1982, — where it got its ass kicked by Dallas (like so many other shows from the early- to mid-1980s). Also not helping was the fact that NBC had gotten rid of Jean Doumanian and most of her SNL cast (Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo were the only survivors of Season 6), with the show more-or-less recovering from its Seasonal Rot with Dick Ebersol at the helm.
• Hope and Faith was still getting decent ratings in Season 3 despite being scheduled opposite American Idol, but ABC canceled it anyway so they could make room for an expanded Dancing with the Stars.
• Houston Medical was a well-received 2002 documentary series about the inner workings of a hospital in Houston (it also received praise for its tasteful handling of one of the series' subjects, a doctor dying of brain cancer). So what did ABC do? Dumped it into the Summer 2002 scheduling with no advertising or awareness whatsoever.
• It's a Living during its two-season stint on ABC, changed timeslots five times.^note In its first season, it was up against the premiere season of the hit series, Magnum, P.I.. In the second season, it had more heavy competition from Walt Disney. To make matters worse, the show also lost a major sponsor (Proctor and Gamble) due to what they felt were outfits that were too revealing and a controversial segment in the pilot episode where one of the waitresses (who was a virgin) was agonizing whether she should go on a vacation with a new boyfriend because it could lead to sex. The other waitresses heartily encouraged her to go and not worry about it. It's a Living was also a victim of the 1980 Screen Actors' Guild strike, which caused the show to have an abbreviated first season. The show was retooled extensively for its second season^note  Susan Sullivan and Wendy Schaal, who played waitresses Lois Adams and Vicki Allen, respectively, were replaced by Louise Lasser, who portrayed waitress Maggie McBurney. with the name changed to Making a Living. Although It's a Living was cancelled by ABC in 1982, the syndicated reruns garnered surprisingly good ratings. Another key factor in the rediscovery of It's a Living was cast member Ann Jillian's public disclosure of her breast cancer diagnosis. With those factors in mind, the show was revived for the First-Run Syndication market in 1985, where it would air for four more seasons.
• It's All Relative (not to be confused with the Leah Remini sitcom of the same name) had a pretty impressive debut with the pilot drawing in 10.2 million viewers and resulting in a full season order, but ABC scheduled the show against American Idol and the (brief) Wednesday edition of Series/60Minutes, which eventually caused ratings to start slipping, ABC then put the show on hiatus in March 2004 and abruptly moved it to a new timeslot on Thursdays, which only made the already declining ratings even worse as the show had to compete against several popular and established shows such as One Tree Hill, America's Next Top Model, Scrubs, The Guardian and 24. After only two episodes in the new timeslot, ABC announced the show's cancellation at their annual upfronts, leaving two episodes unaired in the U.S.
• ABC screwed over Jake In Progress after its Season 2 premiere by replacing its time slot with The Bachelor and canceling the show a few short months afterwards (they screwed over Emily's Reasons Why Not in a similar manner), leaving eight episodes unaired, ABC cited lackluster ratings in the premiere as its reason; it seems more like ABC just wanted an excuse to cancel the show so it could fill another time slot with more of their Lowest Common Denominator reality shows.
• The Jerry Lewis Show was comedian Lewis' attempt at a two-hour talk show. Unfortunately, it was placed inconveniently on Saturdays at 9:30, putting it against the second half of The Defenders and Gunsmoke on CBS and NBC's Saturday Night at the Movies. The first episode was a legendary disaster fraught with every technical difficulty imaginable; critics were merciless and the show never recovered, with ABC deciding they were done two months after the premiere. After ABC had spent $8 million on Lewis (out of a potential $40 million for a five-season run) and Lewis had spent $1 million renovating the El Capitan Theater into the Jerry Lewis Theater to broadcast the show from, the talk show only lasted 13 episodes. ABC at least got something out of it by reusing the theater for a new variety show, The Hollywood Palace, which began as a midseason replacement for The Jerry Lewis Show and had far more success.
• Just the Ten of Us, a spin-off of Growing Pains, was screwed because of politics. Although Just the Ten of Us did well in the ratings on Friday nights (and frequently won its 9:30 PM timeslot), ABC wanted all shows in the TGIF block to be produced by Miller-Boyett Productions (as was the case with fellow programs Full House, Family Matters, and Perfect Strangers). Ultimately, after finding no other suitable time slot for Just the Ten of Us in time for the 1990-91 season, the series was canceled outright and replaced by Going Places (which lasted only one season of 19 episodes, changing its premise on #13).
• Feeling that ABC wasn't promoting it enough, Stephen King spent hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own money to buy print ads for Kingdom Hospital. The network then decided to change the time slot to compete with CSI, meaning all the ads King bought gave the wrong time. King was probably pissed off at this.
• Last Man Standing started off with a large viewership in its Tuesday night slot but the ratings declined by the end of the first season (the average was about 6 million, which was considered okay but not great). As a result, the show was moved to the Friday Night Death Slot for a 13-episode second season. However, the ratings actually improved, so more episodes were ordered for the season and it was renewed for a third. The ratings steadily grew with each successive season and by Season 6 it had an average of 8.1 million viewers per episode (the only scripted series on the network with more was Modern Family) despite getting almost no promotion from the network.
  
  However, ABC pulled the plug after Season 6 finished with no warning or a Grand Finale. ABC President Channing Dungey claimed the reason was that the network decided to revamp the Friday night block and there was no room for it on any other night. The most likely speculated reason is that the show is owned by 20th Century Fox, so it received all of the syndication money while ABC only got advertising revenue.
  
  Tim Allen and a lot of fans, in comparison, suspected that ABC canceled it because the show was a conservative-leaning sitcom that did not fit with liberal-leaning ones like Modern Family and black•ish. But that theory runs contrary to Dungey stating that ABC was now trying to attract Middle American audiences, Blackish showrunner Kenya Barris quitting his show because he felt that the network was censoring the show's anti-Trump stance to appease said demographic, and the subsequent revival of Roseanne that portrayed the title character as a straight-up Trump supporter. In any case, due to popular demand Fox successfully revived Last Man Standing in 2018.
  
  In a twist of irony, Disney bought out 20th Century Fox less than a year later, making ABC's cancellation of the series completely pointless since Fox now only gets ad revenue as opposed to syndication fees. Sure enough, Fox responded by canceling the show after its ninth season, making the entire debacle humiliating and pointless for all parties involved.
• Less Than Perfect was royally screwed by ABC during its final year, first by shortening its Season 4 order from 22 episodes to 13 despite solid ratings for the previous season, then the season was delayed until April. Then only 5 out of 13 episodes were aired; the next two episodes scheduled to air were preempted by NBA games and ABC unceremoniously canceled the show without giving any explanation whatsoever.
• Fans of Lois & Clark had no reason to suspect Season 4 would be its last, as 4-5 had been confirmed for some time as part of a single contract deal. Then ABC got both new Disney ownership and leadership who wanted the time slot for a revival of The Wonderful World of Disney and the contract was reneged on, leaving the cliffhanger unresolved and the hasty removal of "To be continued..." over the last scene.
  • America's Funniest Home Videos may have suffered for this too, given that its 7 pm Sunday timeslot was the first half of the two-hour time slot Disney wanted for the Wonderful World revival. That Videos was already facing trouble, with a weary Bob Saget leaving at the end of the 1996-97 season, couldn't have helped. In any case, the Retooled show was treated poorly (start at 3.2 at the linked page) from that point on, with three time slot changes — ending up on Saturdays. From there, it was demoted to occasional specials. In the end, however, it survived the screwing; once it relaunched as a series with Tom Bergeron as host in 2001, it gradually clawed its way back to being a network fixture and returned to its old Sunday at 7 timeslot.
• Masters Of Science Fiction was an anthology series with plenty of promise (adaptations of stories by popular science fiction writers with a wraparound sequence hosted by none other than Stephen Hawking) but ABC sat on the show for a year, dumped it to Saturday nights and didn't air two episodes as the studio head felt the show was "too intelligent".
• Max Headroom: Give it promotion no series could live up to (like appearing on the cover of Newsweek) and then drop it opposite two wildly-successful shows (Dallas and Miami Vice). This is somewhat different, though, as the reason it was screwed was not due to incompetence or office politics so much as the content may have been too subversive for American tastes. The fact it was ever greenlit at all is a miracle. The show's high price tag was part of the problem, as well. Sci-fi series rely on effects, props, costumes, and set design, which, back in the days before CGI, translated to massively inflated budgets. Given the show's content, it's hardly surprising the executives decided against continuing to sign those huge checks.
• While the screwing may not have been deliberate, The Mole fell victim in Season 5 when ABC's marketing department did so little to promote the show that even many die-hard fans were completely unaware that the show had returned for the first third of the season.
• My So-Called Life. Among other factors, it was in the Thursday Night Death Slot, and up against NBC's Friends and Mad About You. And unlike, say, Last Resort, it ended on a huge, unresolved cliffhanger.
• ABC screwed over the Damon Wayans sitcom My Wife and Kids by canceling it after the creators had already been promised another season, thus ending the series on a cliffhanger as a result (though Word of God's explanation for what would've happened next season lessens the blow somewhat).
• Nashville, despite having never been a ratings hit, was Adored by the Network for several years, getting renewed for four seasons, a devout fan base and stable ratings each season. However, the fourth season ended up proving to be the series' last, due to a combination of Hayden Panettiere's postpartum depression struggles and a rather controversial anti-LGBT law in Tennessee made at the time of the show's fourth season that would've made continuing to air a show about the title city very awkward. The cancellation came as a shock to both fans and media insiders as well, as it looked to them like ABC was going to renew the series even if the ratings weren't as high as they hoped. The show has since been Un-Canceled, with its final seasons airing on cable channel CMT. However, with the move comes a reduced episode budget, so as a result some supporting cast members will not be returning.
• The Partridge Family was a modest ratings success its first three years, debuting at #26 and breaking the Top 20 in Seasons 2-3. Then ABC moved it to Saturday nights opposite All in the Family, which was in the middle of five consecutive seasons at #1. Ratings tanked, and the show was canned.
• Despite Perfect Strangers continuing to do well in the ratings entering the 1991-92 season, ABC had been reportedly trying to cancel the show due to rising costs and advancing age (it was in its seventh season). By early 1992, ABC decided to transfer the series from its 9:30 p.m. slot on the TGIF block to an newly-created offshoot block called "I Love Saturday Night", placing it alongside aging one-time ABC hits Growing Pains and Who's the Boss? plus a new animated series called Capitol Critters. Inevitably, the series (which finished at #32^note not far from its average ranking of 27th place) plummeted to #65 in the ratings, allowing ABC to shelve it. The series would be placed on hiatus and have its final 6 episodes burned off over the summer of 1993, over a year and a half after ABC moved it to Saturday.
• "Phenom" is perhaps one of the most egregious examples with the show being cancelled after only one season despite having fairly high ratings and retaining 95% of it's lead-in audience(something which does not happen that often with scripted shows)nobody who worked on the show seemed to know why ABC cancelled it, seemingly some network execs just personally didn't like the show and cancelled it out of spite.
• Politically Incorrect, the first talk show from Bill Maher, had a highly successful Channel Hop from Comedy Central to ABC in 1997, becoming the network's first late-night talk show in nearly 20 years. The show was more crude in subject matter and more politically-centered than other late-night shows, but proved to be a major success for ABC, pulling in good ratings and earning ten Emmy nominations and winning one in 2000. Unfortunately, the show's edgy humor became too much for ABC when, in the episode airing six days after 9/11, Maher agreed with conservative activist Dinesh D'Souza that the airline hijackers were not acting in a cowardly manner, adding that the United States were the cowardly ones, "Lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away." To say the public was outraged is an understatement, but the two events that ultimately convinced ABC to cancel the series afterward were advertisers boycotting the series, costing ABC much advertising revenue, and a number of ABC affiliates banning the series after the controversial episode. ABC wouldn't return to the late-night field until Jimmy Kimmel was hired to host Politically Incorrect's ultimate replacement, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, which continues to run to this day. Fortunately for Maher, HBO, who co-produced Politically Incorrect, offered him a time-slot on their own network to get his job back. This resulted in what would become his flagship program, Real Time with Bill Maher.
• Disney originally was pretty nice to the Power Rangers franchise, going so far as to show episodes on three different channels. Ratings declined eventually (which many blame on the Audience-Alienating Era of Bruce Kalish), and the last season (Power Rangers RPM) was delegated to a Saturday-morning spot on ABC among tween sitcoms, where it was constantly preempted in the West Coast because of football and golf. Many stations aired the series during ungodly hours or refused to show it at all because it cut into the ability to fulfill their Edutainment Show requirements. It's been stated by RPM's first showrunner that Disney is embarrassed to show the series, let alone produce it.
  • And even once RPM ended, Disney still held the rights for another year, during which they aired a Recut of Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers. This had all of the scheduling problems RPM had, with the added strike against it being nearly-twenty-year-old reruns.
  • Even more, after Operation Overdrive, Disney tried to take control of the Super Sentai portion of the series to tone down the violence. Toei wasn't thrilled.
• The Practice was having great success for six seasons. Then ABC decided to move it from Sunday nights to Monday, supposedly to get out of the way of the similar and strongly-casted NBC show The Lyon's Den (which ended up being canned in less than a year). The Practice suffered a huge drop in ratings during that year. At the end of Season 7, ABC refused to renew the show unless its budget was severely cut, citing "poor ratings". As a result, six of the main cast members were fired. Ironically, the show was put back on Sunday nights for the final season...and to show that David E. Kelley can make lemons into lemonade, he introduced a new character: Alan Shore, played by James Spader. The final season mostly dealt with Shore being wooed by a rival law firm led by Denny Crane, portrayed by special guest star William Shatner. Spader and Shatner both won Emmys later that year for their performances, and both characters and actors were spun off onto a new show, Boston Legal, which lasted for several years.
  • Boston Legal received similar treatment. Despite all the critical acclaim and the core big-name cast, the show bounced around several nights. By the show's final season, the characters were breaking the fourth wall and taking potshots at ABC. The show's ratings were decent through its run (not huge, but decent), but because the demographic that watched skewed older, ABC quickly stopped promoting the show.
  • Related to the mishandling of The Practice was ABC totally mishandling that Monday night block. ABC set up a so-called "Super Monday" programming set with Veritas: The Quest (8PM, teen-oriented), The Practice (9PM) Series/Miracles (10PM, think a religiously-skewing X-Files). The shows were all pretty solid...but kept getting preempted (whether by Iraq War coverage, re-aired specials, you name it...but whatever got in the way was rarely even listed in the TV Guide) despite ABC promising six weeks of new episodes at one point. As a result, Veritas only had four episodes aired, Miracles got six, and eventually ABC resorted to just airing reruns of The Practice in the other slots when they weren't covering the war.
• Pushing Daisies: While a big part of the reason the show was axed was the infamous 2007's TV Strikes, which caused the first season to be halved, ABC pulling advertising for the show when it returned didn't help matters.
• For some reason, ABC decided to screw Samantha Who?, which was undoubtedly one of their most successful shows with high ratings and an award-winning cast. The deathblow? The network decided to move the show from its popular Monday timeslot (right after Dancing With the Stars) to a Thursday time slot right after In the Motherhood, a complete flop that turned off most viewers.
• Tales of the Gold Monkey. Cast and crew members cited a lot of hostility by ABC at the tone of the show (the network wanted Lighter and Softer), the high budget, and "culture clash" (the South Seas Retro setting of the show didn't mesh with ABC's at-the-time "modern urban" sensibilities). It experienced Executive Meddling in scripting from the start and was canned after a single season even with growing ratings and the rival networks certain it would be ABC's flagship.
• ABC originally slated Twin Peaks against Cheers on Thursdays, where it actually performed admirably...then shifted the show's time slot repeatedly. Reportedly ABC felt ambivalent about Twin Peaks (at best) and didn't know what to do with it (or actively tried to kill it, depending on who you ask). After season 1 was performing decently in the ratings, ABC inexplicably and tragically moved the show to the morgue of Saturday night for season 2. And then ABC forced David Lynch to reveal who killed Laura Palmer long before he wanted to, at which point viewers (and Lynch himself) lost interest. The season 2 finale aired after a two-month hiatus, back on Saturday night (after having been moved to weekdays). Only the most die-hard fans tuned in, and it was no surprise when it got the axe.
• Ugly Betty. Its first three seasons aired consistently on Thursday nights at 8:00 PM, but a slight drop in ratings resulted in the show being shunned to the Friday Night Death Slot at 9:00 PM in favor of Flash Forward taking its place (which ended up being canceled). Betty's ratings were cut in half after the night and time switch, and its fans spoke out...so at midseason, it was moved to Wednesdays at 10:00 PM with other comedy shows. Even though the ratings improved, it was too late. The show officially ended at the end of Season 4, not finishing its original ordered run. The show did get a story sendoff, but many plot points were never explained.

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